How to update to WordPress 4.9?

The 4.9 version of the software is now available to download and update directly from your WordPress dashboard.

From your WordPress dashboard, go to the updates section, Dashboard -> Updates and you should see the update available.

Feel free to update your installed themes and plugins to their latest versions while you are in the updates section.

WordPress 4.9 New Features and Updates

The main highlights of WordPress 4.9 include an improved Customizer workflow, new code syntax highlighter, new Gallery widget and several under the hood changes.

Let’s get started with discussing one of my most favourite updates, the new Customizer that can significantly improve your workflow.

Updated Customizer Workflow

Customizer is the gateway for most new users to start customising and designing their website. As such, it’s really nice to see WordPress contributors focusing on the customizer in this latest update.

Some of the major customizers updates include;

Drafting and Scheduling Website Customizations

This is probably one of the biggest changes in customizer that can completely simplify your design changes workflow. Similar to editing posts and pages, with WordPress 4.9 changes, you can now save a draft of your customisations and schedule to publish them when you want.

See the screenshot below to see the feature in action.

The Save & Publish button is now replaced with Publish button with additional settings which lets you save drafts or schedule it to be published at a future date.

Website Preview Links for New Design

You can now save your design and get preview links to send it to anyone before you lock in the changes. This can be really useful if you are collaborating with your team or send changes to your client for preview before you make the changes.

Locking Customizer Changes

You can now lock all the customizer changes so that someone else looking at your draft design cannot make any changes or delete your work. If your collaborator allows, you can take over customizing and make your changes first in real time.

Theme Browser Improvements

Another big customizer update now lets you browse, filter, and preview themes directly within the Customizer. This makes it easy to preview themes before applying any changes without leaving your customization workflow.

You can also filter your search to find themes based on different subjects, features, and layouts.

Autosaving Customizer Changes

Similar to your posts and pages editing experience, WordPress 4.9 now saves all your customizer changes automatically and lets you restore the autosaved versions of your design.

If you move away without making changes, customizer will also ask you if you want to revert back to unsaved changes on your next visit.

Enhanced Code Syntax Highlighter

The code editing feature within WordPress has always been controversial as it a very advanced feature that can easily break website for new users that aren’t comfortable with code.

However, for those that find this feature useful, it has been further enhanced with more features. With the addition of CodeMirror, WordPress 4.9 adds the possibility of syntax highlighting and error checking for any code changes you make in the editor.

You will also see a warning if you proceed to save your code edits with an error. This can easily prevent the white screen that many beginners come across when an attempt to modify the code with simple errors.

The best part of the enhanced code editor is the warning you will see mentioning that it is a dangerous practice to edit your code in this way. See the heads up warning for attempting to edit themes below.

Hopefully, this warning will discourage most users that aren’t comfortable with coding to use the editor.

New Widget Changes

WordPress 4.9 brings in few widget changes along with a completely new gallery widget.

New Gallery Widget

Many WordPress users end up using complex plugins even to display simple galleries around their sidebars. The new gallery widget makes it really easy to insert simple galleries.

And if you know how to insert galleries in your posts and pages, you already know how to use this widget.

Comments

Looks like wordpress has given their users something for the upcoming year. The new 4.9 wordpress seems to be pretty cool.

The updating option is same as usual and the features of new wordpress “Tipton” looks very promising as they are now coming
up with customizer work flow looks very interesting thing to catch upon, which can help freshers to design their web site
in the way they want.

The new widgets icons are also good, nice to see that there would be some changes in the icons to give a more fresh look.

All of the things looks great and I am looking eager to get this new update from the wordpress and see how it works.

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